Elizabethtown College took a trip over to Carlisle, Pennsylvania for the Dickinson College Long/Short Invitational to compete against 19 other schools in the cross country race held at Big Spring High School. The Blue Jays are coming off victories in their home Alumni Challenge and running in their first competition in two weeks. Etown is running at Big Spring for the first time since 2023, with current junior Derek Kendig finishing the 8k 47th overall with a time of 27:12 when running the event back as a first-year, helping the team finish eighth overall. Etown’s women’s team finished 11th in 2023, with current senior Isabell Anderson finishing 89th, the highest of the returning members with a time of 25:33 in the 6k. The men’s team is coming off a victory at Franklin & Marshall College to open their season but hope to capture a strong finish amongst a large group of runners. The women’s team came in after finishing second at F&M and fifth at Shippensburg University, and they hope to continue to find success this season.
Beginning with the men’s 8k, Etown put together a strong showing, finishing third overall in the event containing 19 teams, combining for a score of 33 with an average finish time of 27:02. The Blue Jays finished nine points ahead of Landmark Conference opponent Scranton in fourth and finished behind second place Misericordia by 10 points. Leading the way in points for Etown was Kendig, finishing fifth overall only nine seconds behind the winner with a time of 26:10, improving his previous run at the event by almost a whole minute. Junior Will Inglis finished behind Kendig, running a 26:46, placing ninth overall in the event. Inglis improved his time from his 2023 run at the course by almost a minute, with his first-year time being 27:30. Third for the Blue Jays was senior Martin Ratchford, finishing with a 27:45, placing 23rd overall and improving his time from 2023 by over four minutes and placing over 100 spots better than his first run at the meet. The last points finisher for the Blue Jays was first-year Michael Beach who ran a 28:44.
Senior captain for the Blue Jays Braydon Malley commented on the performance of the men’s team “[The] first 8K of the season is always a bit of a band-aid rip and we’ve put in a lot of work over these past few weeks so legs were a bit tired. Despite that Will, Derek and Marty led the team well, and our Freshman Michael and Jedd showed huge promise in their first ever 8k rounding off our top five.”
The women’s 6k was next, with Etown finishing seventh overall racking up a score of 70, 15 points behind the sixth place Messiah College team. The Blue Jays were led by sophomore Addison Kleinle, who finished 12th overall for the team with a time of 23:55, finishing eight seconds behind the next runner ahead of her. First-year Julia Benincasa finished next, scoring a time of 25:04, and netting a 33rd finish overall. Junior Keely Fitzgerald and Anderson finished next to each other in terms of placing, as Fitzgerald finished the course with a 37th place finish and a time of 25:13 while Anderson finished 38th with a time of 25:19, rounding out the points finishers for the Blue Jays. Anderson finished 14 seconds ahead of her previous time on the Big Spring course.
“I think we had a pretty strong showing! We were definitely missing some key people and we have some injuries going around so once those people are back I think we can have an even stronger team performance,” Anderson said. “I’ll give Addi Kleinle and Julia Benincasa shoutouts because both of them have been killing it this year. Addi ran a huge PR on a tough course, and it was Julia’s first 6k and she worked hard at finishing second on the team today so that was awesome to see too.”
Coach Brian Falk talked about the team’s overall performance, stating, “We had a solid outing at the Dickinson meet– not perfect, but we had some strong individual performances. The next step at Rowan will be seeing more of our people winning their 1-on-1 battles late in the race; we lost too many of those. Derek Kendig and Will Inglis did a great job, placing top-10 in a strong field, as did Addison Kleinle, who’s running at a new level this year and also nearly cracked the top 10.”
Just as Coach Falk said, the Blue Jays will next compete at the Rowan Inter-Regional Border Battle on Oct. 16.
